AMD announces its participation in OpenJDK Project “Sumatra” in collaboration with Oracle and other members of the OpenJDK community to help bring heterogeneous computing capabilities to Java for server and cloud environments.

According to the Sumatra project website, this project intends to enable Java applications to seamlessly take advantage of a GPU – whether it is a discrete device or integrated with a CPU – with the objective to improve the application performance.

Specifically, the project will explore how the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), as well as the Java language and APIs, might be enhanced to allow applications to take advantage of GPU acceleration, either in discrete graphics cards or in high-performance graphics processor cores, such as those found in AMD accelerated processing units (APUs).

According to the announcement, Project Sumatra may also provide guidance on enabling heterogeneous compute support for other JVM-based languages, such as Scala, JRuby, and Jython. You can join the OpenJDK community and Project Sumatra by visiting http://openjdk.java.net/. And, you can learn more about AMD’s involvement in the project here.

In mid-March, Oracle released the eighth version of Java. In addition to small tweaks, the long-awaited release extends the core language, adding elements of functional programming – the first significant development since Java 5.